HP Innovation Journal Issue 12: Summer 2019 | Page 53
P E R P E T UA L E D U C AT I O N
How do standard four-year
universities play into the future
of perpetual education?
One of the issues that my colleagues and I are constantly
dealing with is what to do with dying regional public
universities that are absolutely critical to the future
survival of the regions in which they’re located. The reason
they’re important in that region is that they’re really nodes
to connect it with substance that can be drawn from
anywhere, and to connect that substance in terms of what
one needs to know with the needs of a population which
will inevitably be location-bound. The modes of delivery
to that population will be dramatically different, but that
doesn’t mean there doesn’t need to be some capacity there
that in fact not only helps educate the populations there,
but also educates the populations that may come into
that area that need reskilling. If we go through a process
of basically killing those learning nodes throughout the
country, what you really have is vast parts of this country
that are basically uninhabitable because they don’t have
access to technology learning, so what people are not really
thinking about enough is the network of learning sites that
is essential for any part of this country to survive in the
future economy.
You point to Ireland as a country that
has had success with reskilling—why
is that educational system working?
The key is for a country to keep focused on a goal over
a long period of time across changes in political lead-
ership, and Ireland has had some success with that.
What’s driving the economy in Ireland, aside from the
fact of tax policy, is that Ireland was open to immi-
gration, especially from Eastern and Central Europe,
which then provided the workforce that could make it
possible for high-end technology companies serving
Europe to be based in Ireland. Somehow, in a very frag-
mented culture, they have been able to keep focused on
why an educated population makes a difference. They are
one of a few examples of countries that have been able
to do that kind of thing.
What are some other
global success stories?
Penang, Malaysia, is a node for more high-tech companies
than you can imagine. They have an incredible learning
center, where providers from throughout the world are
reskilling the population necessary for those companies.
But it really begins with a constant understanding of what
the needs are of the population that they’re trying to train.
Penang is just a prime example where they were working
with basically very low-skill jobs, but then needed to move
a whole economy to meet a higher level of engineering and
everything else. Part of that was in fact developing a much
more flexible learning process to meet the needs of that
changing population. They started out doing piecework,
manufacturing with a very low-skilled workforce, and they
imported that workforce from the Philippines and all over
the place. They suddenly realized there was no way that
they could continue to compete as a center for that, so they
had to totally upscale that workforce. They did this not by
building new universities, but by essentially changing their
network of providers. It became a learning center which is
involved in the changing natures of the manufacturers who
are trying to sustain their competitive position in the area.
Now, if they didn’t do that, that area would become a waste-
land, because in the global economy, the major companies
would just move somewhere else.
Can that education model
work in the U.S.?
To take that to the U.S., what we really need are nodes
of redesigned community colleges, which are essen-
tially regionally distributed, in order to make it possible
for employers to function in the area and then have a
constantly retrained and developed workforce. And that
cannot just be centralized in the major urban areas.
It needs to be a decentralized, geographically dispersed
set of places.
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